Explained (2018–…): Season 2, Episode 9 - Beauty - full transcript

[man] A professional domino
artist is someone

who can set up thousands and thousands
of dominoes

to create structures, patterns, images.

[narrator] In 2017, Steve Price led a team

that built a domino display
of more than 76,000 pieces.

Smashing a Guinness World Record.

[Price] You can build
flat on the ground two-dimensional,

or you can also do 3-D structures
like pyramids and walls

and make certain
sort of curves and spirals.

[narrator] And his YouTube videos
get millions of views.

[Price] The pleasure of watching
the dominoes toppling



just comes from knowing
how much went into the project.

As the viewer, you get to just watch it
all fall into place.

[narrator] Humans love looking
at all kinds of things.

Why are millions of people watching
videos of cookies getting iced?

Or enjoy looking at a collage made up
of 21 cutout images of pimples?

Others like Gothic churches,
horses, synchronized swimming,

and of course, other people.

Where do these preferences come from?

And why is beauty something
we seek at all?

[man] Art is an individual
creative experience.

The greater the knowledge one possesses,
the greater will be the experience.

Many photographers owe
their success to specialization.

It might be still life,

babies, animals, or fashion.



The Earth, I'm afraid,
is in a class by itself.

[laughs]

[man] The placement
is exact and symmetrical.

Exactness in details helps in giving
the final impression of perfection.

[narrator] For thousands of years,
philosophers have tried to explain beauty.

Aristotle said, "Beauty depends
on magnitude and order."

Confucius said, "I have not seen one
who loves virtue as he loves beauty."

Kant said, "The beautiful is that
which pleases universally,

without a concept."

In the Renaissance,
the seeds of an answer were planted

when an Italian mathematician named
a number the Divine Proportion

in a book illustrated
by Leonardo da Vinci.

Mathematicians have been fixated
on this number since ancient times,

because it kept coming up in geometry.

In the 1800s, a German psychologist
decided this number

was the universal law of beauty,
and today it's known in popular culture

as the golden ratio,
with people claiming to find it

in all kinds of human masterpieces
all over the world.

But, there's a problem with that.

When people have tried
to study it directly,

it's not so clear that everybody responds
specifically to the golden rectangle.

[narrator] Study after study
has found little evidence

that people are especially drawn
to rectangles with this exact proportion.

We do like rectangles though.

It's the best flowing configuration
for images from plane to brain.

As in, the fastest shape
our brains can process.

Pleasant to look at
because it's easy on the eyes.

And many scientists today
believe the reason for this

boils down to survival.

More than 150 million years ago,
dinosaurs dominated the Earth.

But to understand
how humans see the world,

you have to look down
at the dinosaur's feet.

That's where our ancestors,
small shrew-like mammals,

spent their time and they had
a pretty dim view of the world.

They perceived just two colors:
blue and red.

They were also nocturnal to evade
their better-seeing predators

and constantly scanned
their environment horizontally.

And that may be the simple reason we make
so many things in that shape today.

Visual beauty is based in vision,
of course,

and our vision evolved
because it helped us survive.

When the dinosaurs went extinct,
our ancestors came out into the light.

And over time, their eyes developed,

opening up all the colors of the rainbow
we know today.

And many things
we're still visually drawn to

are things that helped
our ancestors survive.

Flowers indicated that something
might turn into fruit.

Water sources signal
the possible bounty of nourishment.

And places of refuge
helped us evade predators.

We still like landscapes that resemble
where early humans evolved.

Two artists conducted a survey
in the 1990s,

to find the most desirable painting
in 14 different countries.

They asked questions, like...

"Would you rather see paintings
of outdoor or indoor scenes?"

"Which one, if any, of the following types
of outdoor scenes appeals to you most?"

and "Would you say
that you prefer paintings

in which the people are nude
or fully clothed?"

The resulting painting looked like this
in the United States.

In France, like this.
This was Turkey's. This China's.

This is sometimes referred to
as the African savanna hypothesis,

because savanna's have those properties.

[narrator] Blue skies,
a sheltering rock of some kind,

something edible growing
in a big sweep of water.

Turns out,
we're terribly unoriginal creatures.

Part of beauty is just a desire to live.

[chirping]

But not everyone's sold
on some kind of explanation for beauty.

I think scientists have been misled,

by the fantastic experience
of explaining something,

to think that those kinds of explanations
have broad power.

[narrator] In 2017,

Richard Prum published a book

that caused a stir

in the world of evolutionary biology.

In it, he argues that not all beauty
is about survival or fitness.

Some of it is arbitrary and even useless.

Take the tail of the peacock...

[Prum] The tail is covered
with hundreds of beautiful eye spots,

each one of which includes
four or five different colors

created by optical nanostructures
in the feathers

that are made up of melanin granules

organized in a crystalline fashion.

[narrator] Female peacocks,
they're actually called peahens,

are drawn to these tails.

During courtship display,
a male peacock erects his tail

and creates a huge sort of hemisphere

that suspends
over the female as he displays.

[narrator] But the tails are heavy
and make it harder

for the male peacocks to run and fly.

Their beauty, essentially,
is bad for their survival.

[caws]

This even stumped Charles Darwin
as he wrote in a letter to a colleague.

[Prum] "Whenever I gaze at a feather
from the tail of a peacock,

it makes me sick!"

He was troubled by the fact
that adaptation by natural selection

could not describe the evolution
of ornaments that would not help

in the struggle for survival.

He proposed the theory of sexual selection
and what he was hypothesizing,

was that mate choice is really about
the subjective experiences of animals.

[narrator] And it's not just the peacock
that has seemingly unhelpful ornaments.

There's the flame bowerbird
and his waving cape.

The sage grouse
and his inflatable yellow chest.

The great frigatebird
and his ballooning red throat pouch.

The shoebill and his bill
that looks like a shoe.

[Prum] So, there aren't any birds
in the world today

that don't exhibit the radiation,

the elaboration,
the diversification of preference.

It's about pleasure.

Pleasure is the motivation that drives
the choices that animals make.

[narrator] In the human brain,
that's what beauty is: pleasure.

[Chatterjee] So our view, is that
the combined activation of visual cortex

and these reward systems together

is the biologic signature
of our response to beauty.

[narrator] Three main
neurotransmitter systems are involved.

First, the dopamine system.

The dopamine system seems to be
about our desires and our wanting things.

[narrator] A surge of dopamine
can literally move us.

It is what motivates us to approach
things that we find attractive.

[narrator] Beauty can also activate
our endocannabinoid and opioid systems.

The same systems that are activated
by consuming cannabis or opioids.

They seem to be
the core experience of pleasure.

[narrator] But peahens evolved

to find pleasure
in the same kind of peacock tail.

Explaining all the pleasure
humans get from beauty is harder,

because we don't all agree.

It was once a sign of beauty in Japan
to dye your teeth black.

It was once a sign of beauty in Europe
to pluck out all your eyelashes.

In America today, some consider it
a sign of beauty to stain, spray,

mist, burn, or mousse your skin bronze.

We humans are deeply cultural creatures.

We're influenced
by our social environment,

and we take variation in that environment
and we incorporate it into ourselves.

Aesthetic preferences are established
psychologically through development,

through exposure,
and through individual innovation.

[Stoller] Of course,
we're all kind of culturally conditioned

depending on our context.

But, I think I'm always trying
to ask myself,

"Why do I think that?
Where does that come from?"

[Price] The culture of domino art
is definitely based around the internet.

There is a very big niche community
for people who enjoy this sort of thing.

One hundred fifty years ago,
impressionist paintings,

they had a hard time
breaking into the scene.

Now, if you survey most Americans,

people tend to say
they like impressionist artwork the most.

Our brains haven't changed in 150 years,

and yet these kinds of population-based
preferences have changed dramatically.

Right? So, that has to be
from what we're exposed.

[narrator] Take color.

In the USA today,
pink is often associated with young girls.

But it 1927, when Time magazine surveyed
ten major American department stores,

half said pink was the color for boys.

That shift happened
over the following decades.

Thanks in part,
to toy marketing campaigns in the 1980s.

I love you, My Little Pony.

[narrator] And dark yellow.

One study found that babies' eyes
linger the longest on this color.

But adults around the world

consistently rank

this as their least popular color.

A leading theory is that as we grow up,

we learn to associate this shade
with unpleasant things.

There are complicated ways
in which our experiences, our education,

and also the structure of a society

can have an influence
on what one regards is attractive.

You can look at a painting of a monarch

and just be amazed
at the opulence or the beauty.

On the other hand, if the whole notion
of monarchy is disturbing to you,

then you're not going
to find it beautiful.

How to get a sense of what certain people
find satisfying is really hard,

which is why scientists

generally tend to focus on the things
that most people get pleasure out of.

[narrator] There isn't robust research yet

to explain why some people
see beauty in this...

or this...

or this...

But researchers studying the brain

during moments
of peak aesthetic experience

believe they may have found a clue
in an area of the brain called the DMN.

The DMN is the Default Mode Network.

So you can almost think of it
as the idling state of the brain.

[narrator] In brain scans

when people are asked to do
a task or think about something specific,

this area of the brain quiets down.

The DMN actually lights up
when we aren't doing a specific task

and our minds turn inward.

They probably reflect
a kind of internal state,

when you're kind of spacing out,
when you're mind's wandering,

when you're self-reflective.

[narrator] In a few recent experiments,

people were presented with images of art
from a variety of cultural traditions.

And something surprising happened.

The DMN region in their brains lit up.

But, only when they were looking

at the paintings
they said moved them the most.

It is triggering
a whole set of associations

and thoughts in our own brain,

which is a kind of free play
of our own imagination.

[narrator] The researchers
believe this is evidence

that our experience of beauty

involves connecting our senses
and emotions with something personal.

Our sense of self.

There's something
about being moved by paintings

that forces us to be self-reflective.

That may be the biologic signature

of what it means
to feel moved by a painting.

[narrator] Which could help explain
why we're draw to and moved by

the same kind of images,
even as our memories slip away.

There's been research that suggests
that people with dementia

continue to have the same taste in art

as they had all their lives.

In an experiment from 2008,

20 people with Alzheimer's disease
were shown a range of paintings.

Some were representational,
like "People in the Sun" by Edward Hopper.

Some, less so,
like Picasso's "Weeping Woman."

And others were totally abstract,
like "Composition" by Mondrian.

The patients were asked to rank
the paintings in order of preference.

Two weeks later,
they were given the same task.

When asked to rank the original paintings,

they put them in largely
the same order as before.

Our sense of beauty is deep.

[woman] I thought
that Randy's was beautiful.

- [applause]
- And she has a great sense of color.

[narrator] And for people with dementia,
making art can be powerful therapy.

[woman] I find the color is
the thing that sticks out the most for me.

Then, the feeling of movement.

I love movement in painting.

What else do we see in here?

[woman 2] I see the sun.

I have Lewy body dementia.

And for me, it was a big shock.
I'm sure it is for everybody.

We all suffer from memory loss.

Different degrees depending on the person
and how long they've suffered with this.

I think that, to the extent we retain
our preferences for certain kinds of art,

or certain pieces of art,

it means that those pieces
speak to us in a deep way.

To me, it's so wonderful
to watch people painting.

- [applause]
- [woman] Whoo!

[Mittelman]
Look at their faces. They come alive.

People with dementia,
as well as the rest of us.

Imagine a scenario where we were
all wearing exactly the same clothes.

Every meal had no taste.

That our houses were all uniform.

Is that a world anybody
would want to live in?

The absence of beauty,
the absence of surrounding ourselves

with aesthetic experiences,

I think, just makes
for a very impoverished life.

Perfect.

[theme music playing]